"The White House will shut down its covid response team after the public health emergency ends in May, with some staffers already departing and national coordinator Ashish Jha likely to leave the administration once his team is disbanded.

The move to disband the White House covid team, created in February 2020 and expanded to about three dozen staffers under President Biden, comes as the pandemic has receded from U.S. voters’ minds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still links over 2,000 deaths per week to covid year-round.

At the same time, Republicans on the campaign trail are ramping up attacks on coronavirus vaccines and capitalizing on many voters’ frustration with policies intended to curb the pandemic. And on Capitol Hill, House Republicans, now in the majority, are charging ahead with investigations into the origins of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, some have called for the White House to ramp up its virus messaging and responsibilities, not wind them down.

‘The federal government is relieving itself of responsibility for the ongoing death, disability and debility wrought by covid at a time when continued intervention is critical,” Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton wrote this month .

Kristin Urquiza, co-founder of patient advocacy group , said the Biden administration has erred by focusing almost solely on vaccinations to the exclusion of measures like masking in crowded places. ‘The communication around the pandemic has been too little, too late,’ she said. ‘The focus on a single approach to the problem … has proven to not be successful.’

Deborah Birx, who served as the nation’s first coronavirus coordinator, suggested that too few anti-pandemic mechanisms have been put in place to justify winding down the team. She said the administration has missed opportunities to improve the monitoring of virus data, invest in the development of more durable vaccines and take other steps that Biden vowed to accomplish in his sweeping covid plan. ‘It’s not too early [to disband] if we had used the last two years to build all of these systems that we needed — but we haven’t,’Birx said.

She also lamented the public’s reduced attention to covid’s risks, noting that the virus’s evolution has allowed it to evade some treatments and left immunocompromised Americans with fewer protections.

‘No one is even talking about that vulnerable Americans are more vulnerable today than they were a year ago,’ Birx said."

The Washington Post

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